This Japanese publication celebrates a landmark anniversary for the year 2013!!
Starting this month the Japanese serialized manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump has begun celebrating it's 45th anniversary in publishing their magazine that has brought us some of the best selling manga series of all time. If you've been a fan of DRAGON BALL, NARUTO, ONE PIECE, or BLEACH. This is the magazine where they all started, and these are probably the only ones you've heard of. For the rest of the year, you can expect to see Shueisha's flagship magazine mark their covers with the 45th Anniversary tag, as you can see on the cover above.
The series began as a semimonthly publication between 1968–1969, but moved to weekly distribution in October of 1969. Since then it's published almost every week in the year with a few breaks for national holidays. It was back in 2008 that Shonen Jump hit the 2,000th issue, and in a few more weeks it will hit 2,200 issues published. The above issue is 2.198. Regardless of your thoughts on manga, that's an accomplishment to be applauded. If you're curious how this magazine manages to stay strong since the late 60s. You can see my article Publishing Tricks: Comics vs. Manga.
I would like to also give a mention that this series publication has begun to spread so far that is was recently they opened up a US branch website that will be publishing official English translated chapters the week they are released in Japan. Basically, they are trying to undercut the popularity of pirated fan translated manga chapters. I'm still personally a bit dubious of this option, given the US company in charge of the translation, VIZ Media, has a practice of censoring manga and making certain scenes childish. One example would be in NARUTO Vol. 36 Ch. 328. VIZ painted out the cigarette and lighter out of the hand and mouth of Shikamaru Nara and ruined a great moment of character drama.
-Kristoffer Remmell (FoxxFireArt) is a freelance graphic artist, writer, and over all mystery geek.- Follow for news updates: @ FoxxFireArt
Log in to comment